I’ve had trouble writing about these comics because there is so much packed into them: Fire Fang and all that yellow peril implies, which I’ve discussed a little here; Carr’s importance in Australian comics; and an artistic style so diverse that I checked twice that Carr was sole artist for both issues.

So I had two books and not much context beyond my own knowledge of Chinese yellow peril villains, 1970s adult comics like Heavy Metal and Vampirella (known colloquially in these parts as, “booby comics”), and a little Chinese history. But as I read, I noticed that the stories all bear the mark of Hammer Studios’ 1970s vampire films when Hammer shifted to the sexy end of the vampire spectrum and horror gave way to, continuing a trope: boobs, if boobs are a synecdoche for the eroticism/sexploitation of The Vampire Lovers (1970); Countess Dracula (1971); Dracula, AD 1972 (1972); and Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973). Unlike two of those films, the Vampire! stories are mostly period pieces set in the 1880s/90s or the1930s. But all the women’s breasts remind me of Hammer’s Horror Queen, Ingrid Pitt

For his part, Fire Fang is the total yellow peril package. He has the long nails, the Ming the Merciless collar, and if he were in color, he would be, as Jules Feiffer says, “the color of ripe lemons.”* Lemon yellow or no, he continues the tradition of villains such as Fu Manchu or Li H’sen Chang from the Doctor Who episode, “The Talons of Weng Chiang.” Mostly, Fire Fang is not so much a Chinese vampire as a Chinese vampire played by Christopher Lee. It’s not a stretch for Lee since he has played Fu Manchu.

In “The Exile of Fire Fang,”a “Mandarin of the Second Class” uses a beautiful concubine as bait to trap the vampire. The official tells the captive Fire Fang, “It is written by the Great Shih Chioo in the Ancient Chronicles of Ghouls and Devourers ‘that he who preserves the vampire’s supernatural life shall have the vampire’s services for two years.’” (1)

I like to think that there’s a book called, The Ancient Chronicles of Ghouls and Devourers, and that it contains instructions on building vampire traps.

As part of what is surely an inscrutably villainous scheme, Fire Fang is sent to Australia at the height of the Gold Rush with four “coolies” sworn to serve him. The men quickly tire of supplying Fire Fang with buxom white women and impale him with a pickaxe as he sleeps the sleep of the undead in an abandoned mine. The coolies then become bandits. Unfortunately, they’re caught pretty quick. So we never get their tale of derring-do, one in which they use racist stereotypes to throw the white devils off their trail.

In “Who Freed Fire Fang?” a young couple discover the crate containing the staked Fire Fang and foolishly remove the pickaxe waking Fire Fang, as others have foolishly woken Dracula, in the 1970s. According to Comics Down Under there’s one more uncollected story, “Fire Fang’s Circus.” I wonder how much it would recall “The Talons of Weng Chiang,” in which the villain is a stage magician reminding us that while we should be on the lookout for all Chinese men, we should also never trust traveling entertainers or circus folk.

But if villains like Fire Fang lead me to wonder, “What makes a white man look in the mirror and think, ‘Yes, I do have a faintly Oriental cast?” Dr. “Chinese” Patterson is the very man who thinks that. Patterson’s the protagonist of “The Brothers of Fire Fang,” in Vampire! #2. He plans “a walking Odyssey” from Shanghai to Rangoon and decides to pass, wearing Chinese clothing and “a pigtail pinned under his cap” to avoid the notice of “Chinese who hadn’t seen a white man before.” But while perfectly at home in China, Patterson never forgets who he is as he demonstrates while fighting bandits, shouting, “Advance Australia! And damn your kind!”

It’s okay to damn their kind, because Patterson is pals with Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, who he dismissively refers to as, “a local rebel.” Dr. Sun has arranged for a boatman to deliver Patterson to a village beset by the Brothers of Fire Fang: “Fang Cheng the Destroyer. He rode with Genghis Khan. In a far off country he was the first to be inflected….The deep breathing Lungki, the most chilling of the brothers. But known not to like European blood.” And, “Taka the Missionary Killer—bent on thwarting Christianity in China. His score of murders was high.”

Patterson has come to help a man named, Yun Chuwan. Frankly, I’m not sure why Yun needs help fighting vampires because he’s already hung three vampire heads from the town gates as a warning to others. Maybe on the other side of this Hammer horror story there’s a Cantonese hopping vampire one, like Mr. Vampire, and Patterson is the idiot who only makes things worse by not listening to Yun. But in Vampire!, Patterson gets right down to business—sleeping with Yun’s daughter Yee and explaining toYun that opium will not just be a blight, but a medical boon, establishing him as both Imperially virile and a visionary who foresees the Great War.

Like the Mandarin of the Second Degree before him, Patterson might also have been visionary enough to use Yee as bait. She slips out at night to bathe–at least I think that’s why she dips her breasts into a creek. After her bath, Yee is attacked by the three vampire brothers with such ferocity that she has no time to close her shirt. Patterson mans rockets he has already set up and waits for the vampires to cross the line of fire he has prepared. After dispatching the vampires, Patterson salaciously notes in a faux gentlemanly way that stayed he “longer than he planned” but left her, “a brave girl with the ashes of our adventure.”

Incidentally, the non-Fire Fang collected in these two comics stories feel pretty Hammer as well. In “The Unholy Relic,” a be-nightgowned woman** is menaced by a vampire, saved and attacked later by a bust of the very same vampire’s head. In “Home is the Specter, Home from the Haunt,” the double D starlets of Australia’s Mammoth Studios are set upon by a vampire during the filming of a Dracula knock-off starring the Bela Lugosian, Roberto Verio. Incidentally, that story has my favorite line of any in the comics: “I discovered long ago, a defence against a vampire’s great strength… Judo!”

3 Comments

I wish to explain and correct, The story The brothers of Fire Fang was inspired by the Australian adventurer Chinese Morrison. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Ernest_Morrison
Who became adviser to the first president of China, Dr Sun Yat-Sen. When he was confronted by a anti foreigner mob on his arrival in China he would exclaim Advance Australia!
This is a story set in the Ninetenth Century not in the PC Twentieth first Century. He proceeded by disguising himself as a Chinese. I grew up in Bendigo, a City created by the Great Australian Gold Rush, the Chinese dragon was an exciting part of my childhood. The body would swoop over our heads, trailing fire crackers and smoke, flashing mirrors to ward of evil spirits ! One of the local disappearance stories was of the police trooper who disappeared on his patrol of the Chinese camp in the eighteenth century. One of the Chinese descendants joked that the trooper was put in a crate and shipped back to China. I reversed that to a Chinese Vampire being shipped to Australia in a crate. If you Google images for Chinese Vampires, some are western creations some are Chinese. I wonder what the reaction would be if I came up with the hopping Vampire. Fire Fang had to be regal, a Chinese vampire that could match Dracula. Basically the medium is the message. Long live Loong! Fire Fang appeared on front and back covers of Fire Fang! He was not coloured yellow.

The Book!

We Have Mantis Fist Diagrams!

Gutter Business

Of Note Elsewhere

BBC Radio 4 has an adaptation of Robert L. Pike’s Bullitt. “Lieutenant Clancy, head throbbing from days without sleep, is assigned to protect important Mafia witness Johnny Rossi. But when he is found dead, Clancy has only a matter of hours to find the killer before his enemy, Assistant District Attorney Chalmers, finds out.”

Share:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

~

Andreas Hartmann talks about his documentary, My Buddha is Punk. “Around 2011, after 50 years of military rule, it appeared Burma was starting to change. But violation of human rights were continuing, the civil war was still going on and ethnic minorities were still persecuted. I was interested in how the youth, the future of the country, were dealing with that situation. At the time, Kyaw Kyaw was dreaming about a flourishing punk scene and was trying make his own dreams come true. He lived an interesting philosophy by connecting ideas from Buddhism and punk.”

Share:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

~

BBC Radio 4 has an adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ “The Haunted House.” “In 1860, the formidable Countess Narona marries a rich young aristocrat in London–but shortly after travelling to Venice her husband dies, apparently of natural causes, leaving the Countess a rich woman. Years later, guests in a Venetian hotel encounter the terrifying apparition of a murder victim seeking revenge.”

Share:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

~

“In 1924, Dracula premiered on stage in London, adapted by Irish actor and playwright Hamilton Deane. This production introduced the world to the charming, well-coifed, tuxedo-clad Count Dracula, as portrayed by Raymond Huntley (who allegedly provided his own costume). Without the subtleties a novel provides, Count Dracula’s sophisticated demeanor and seductive nature was communicated more explicitly for the stage.” More at Smithsonian.com.

I think now I shouldn’t have listened to him. But my experiences with the New York houses had not been good. My book covers ranged from mediocre to ghastly. There were problems with editing, especially copy editing and especially the copy editor who had a nervous breakdown while working on one of my books. He was apparently picked up by the cops, wandering through the streets of New York, either naked or with a gun. (I no longer remember which.) The publishing house realized the only copy of the manuscript was in the guy’s apartment, and they couldn’t get to it. Rather than contacting me for another copy, they hunted around the office and found an earlier version of the novel and typeset that. When I got the proofs to go over, I found serious problems, which had to be solved by me reading changes over the phone to an editor in New York with a pen. Of course mistakes were made and appeared in the published version.”

Share:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

~

Refinery 29 has an interview with YA author and writer of Marvel’s new America Chavez comic, Gabby Rivera. “What I noticed when I was reading the Young Avengers was that it felt like America was being pulled in by different characters — [Thor villain] Loki wanted her to do this or that; the fight wasn’t hers. She was treated like a member of the team, but I always wondered what’s in it for her? So my thinking for this new book is that she’s finally asking herself that question: What’s in it for me? Why am I fighting with these people? What I want is to go to college and I want to start over, and I want to learn about myself and do this for myself. And so that is the big thing that I was thinking about. What’s more American than trying to go to college and trying to find yourself?”